Category Archives: online publishing

This is terrific news for proponents of open access to research; it puts academic publishers and academic journals on notice that federally-funded research must be made open access within a year of publication.

The death of Mr. Swartz, apparently by suicide, is a tragic loss to the open access movement, and indeed to the world at large. He is perhaps most famously known for having hacked into the computer network at M.I.T. and then downloading most of the articles available on JSTOR in an attempt to make them free to the public. He was facing charges for that act that could have netted him years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.

JSTOR itself, it should be noted, declined to press charges. It was the State Prosecutor for Massachusetts* who pursued Mr. Swartz (to his death, some would argue).

As an academic who participates in the process of scholarly information production and exchange, I have some understanding of the time, money, and effort it takes to conduct research, write and publish articles, run an academic journal, collect and curate said articles, and archive them in ways that make them available to others in a useful form. That work deserves fair compensation. But at the same time, corporations have become gatekeepers to that information (which is often produced at public expense at public universities, funded by public grants) and are charging what appear to be exorbitant amounts of money for access.

The Open Access model of information production and distribution requires a fundamental restructuring of the way information is produced, circulated, and valued in our culture. The current model is deeply entrenched, and will not change without significant buy-in from stakeholders who are currently highly resistant. Thus some activists are taking back their power by circumventing the system and forming alternate systems outside the current publishing structure. Mr. Swartz was one of those. He did so, not for any gain of his own, but because of his passionate conviction that the producers and users of information need to take back control of their intellectual property and make it freely available (or as free as possible). The entire system of scholarly production and exchange is changing, and the sooner the corporations that tie up intellectual information in proprietary databases realize this, the better.

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*Correction: an earlier version of this post said it was the federal government that pursued prosecution of Mr. Swartz. The corrected information is above.

Ms. Wise said that it’s also a misconception that publishers like Elsevier make scientists pay to read their own work. “What publishers charge for is the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.

“And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter. All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more efficient. That’s the added value that we bring.”

. . . .

Those arguments, however, are lost on senior scholars like Mr. Gowers, who told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another’s papers on open Web sites. “That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective,” he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. “It could disappear tomorrow, and I’d never notice that it’s gone,” he said.

The key term here is “added value.” As I learned in my two library science courses, metadata and distribution are important, time-consuming to produce, and thus costly. But at the same time, there are other channels increasingly available, and open-source software that can perform some of the same distribution structure, metadata analysis and tagging. Although again, there is a trade-off between “free” software and the time investment in learning to use it. I think the wide availability of virtually “free” internet (free to the user that is) obscures the costs in manpower and time that it takes to support such “free” use; that cost is either recovered in user fees, advertising, selling data, or is crowd-sourced (volunteer effort by users and techies).

The bottle-neck is distribution: journals do have a virtual monopoly, and libraries are continually underfunded. It makes sense to me to take the middleman (the journals) out of the mix, and allow scholars to publish online and referee each others’ work. But it is a completely different model. I do think for it to happen, it will need to be driven by scholars themselves, so that the academic culture itself changes the value that it places upon publication in refereed journals. According to the new model, the truly innovative and valuable work will bubble to the top of academic social networks, much like reddit and other social networking sites.